Christmas Present
Ordinary People - Ordinary Places - Extraordinary Story
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| Christmas lights going up in Knaresborough |
Last year I heard a friend talk about a Christmas photo
project that he put together. You can read about it on his blog http://vfxhanley.wordpress.com/do-you-wonder/
. This got me and a local Methodist minister thinking about whether we could do
something similar here in the North East. They did it slightly different to us
in that their images were in 3D and they had them up in one place, but other
than that it’s basically the same idea.
We have taken a
series of photos of local people, in local settings from the North East, who
take on the persona of some of the key characters in the traditional nativity
story. Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus, the
Magi, angels, shepherds etc. We will be placing these pictures in public spaces
for people to view, and we have agreed to have some put up in our local Costa
Coffee in Whitley
Bay and other local
cafes/bars. Then, in the final week before Christmas, we are putting all the
photos together in one place for people to view. The pictures will be on display from the
first week in December in various places, look out for the connected flier, and
they will also be able to be seen in the weeks to come on my blog.
Alongside this, we got together with a few creative folk to
put some worship material together that will be used around a different image
on each Sunday through Advent. So if you live nearby to North Shields and
Whitley Bay why not invite a friend to come along to church with you and see
what it’s all about. Also over the four
weeks in advent I will be posting something each week which relates to one of
the pictures we have taken.
The idea behind this is about engaging our local community
with the traditional Christmas story in ways that ask the question... what do
you do with this story? This project is
about putting the nativity story in a modern context and I suppose asks a
challenging question about what do we do with the traditional story that God
came to earth as a small vulnerable baby. Why not, as you view the pictures,
ask these questions
Is Christmas present for you?
What is Christmas wrapped up in for you?
So the long awaited Christmas Present project is live! As part of this journey I will be posting a fresh blog each week of advent. Each blog will show one of the pictures from the project which will also be the focus of services in local Methodist Churches for that week.
